Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones (37, 1-14)

The moment depicted in this drawing is that when, erring through the Valley of Dry Bones, the prophet Ezekiel sees how ‘the bones came together’ and ‘the sinews and the flesh came up upon them’, and how, thanks to the winds, ‘breath came into them’ (Ezekiel, chapter 37, verses 7-10). The subject, a prefiguration of the Last Judgment, was particularly popular in Northern Germany (S. Alsteens in Dürer and Beyond. Central European Drawings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1400-1700, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012, pp. 129-1380, under no. 58). However, the present work appears to be North Netherlandish, and of an earlier date than many other examples. The attribution to Dirck – or Wouter? – Crabeth suggested in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century inscription on the verso cannot be accepted today and the sheet must remain anonymous for now, but the hand is that of an original and inventive artist active towards the end of the first half of the sixteenth century. The use of brush and certain stylistic traits recall those of drawings attributed to the Leiden artists Aertgen Claesz. van Leyden and the Master of 1527 (for examples, see J.P. Filedt Kok et al. in Lucas van Leyden en de Renaissance, exhib. cat., Leiden, Museum De Lakenhal, 2011, nos. 124.1, 124.2, 128, 129, 145, ill.).